There are signs of life for a long-stalled mixed-use development proposal in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood.

It’s been a difficult slog for The Mid vision, but facing a looming state-imposed deadline for public financing, the development team anticipates beginning site work soon. Construction is expected to start later this fall at the vacant 3.8-acre site on Woodward Avenue north of Mack Avenue near Detroit’s Whole Foods Inc. grocery store and the Detroit Medical Center campus. 

The city has received recent plans for part of the project, a 14-story hotel, according to public records made available online late last month.

“We look forward to sharing much more detail about this important development in the very near future,” Dietrich Knoer, president of Southfield-based Q-Partners LLC, said in an emailed statement.

That entity is connected to Mohammad Qazi, president and CEO of Southfield-based Ciena Healthcare, who paid $15 million for the site in 2018. Knoer has previously been a top executive with Southfield-based Redico LLC, Peter Cummings’ The Platform LLC and the Eastern Market Development Corp.

It’s been five and a half years since Qazi and his development team first floated The Mid project, which has encountered buzzsaws ranging from financing challenges to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The proposal originally included a pair of high rises as the focal points of the development that would include both for-sale and for-rent residential, hotel, retail, parking, green space and other uses.

But since then, little has happened. Years have passed since the original 2019 construction start timeframe. The site remains empty, with a fence and scrim making promises for a development that has long remained dormant. 

Under legislation that was approved a year ago, Michigan lawmakers said the project needed to have seven stories of a 15-story building completed by the end of 2026 in order to receive $8.97 million in previously-approved brownfield tax credits, which representatives of what most recently was a $377 million project have said is needed in order for it to move forward. It was the second such deadline extension, with one also approved in 2021. 

When it was first unveiled in March 2019, plans for The Mid included a 25-story hotel and condominium tower and a 30-story residential tower, plus other buildings. They would be among the tallest buildings built north of Mack since the 1920s. It has gone through several incarnations, with varying mixtures of uses. 

The current scope for the project is not known. 

The property is adjacent to a tower, The Plaza, a former office building-turned-apartment-building that is now going to be turned into an extended-stay hotel under the Marriott Bonvoy flag.